ADB to fund US$80m for employment in Himachal

The Indian Government has signed a US$80 million loan agreement with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to help boost employment and skill development in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh. The fund will be invested to modernise technical and vocational education and training (TVET) institutions and improve the skills ecosystem in Himachal Pradesh. The project will support the employment initiatives of the State Government of Himachal Pradesh and help the state step-up reform and scale-up its talent development efforts. The agreement will fund short-term and long-term training programs in growth areas such as automobiles, electronics, pharmaceutical, tourism and hospitality, banking and financial services and healthcare to help enhance the skills set of the youth and increase their employability.
Kenichi Yokoyama, country director of ADB’s India Resident Mission, said that after achieving strong enrollment rates for higher education, Himachal Pradesh faces “second-generation” challenge of preparing its youth for the fast changing labour market. Herein the funding will help in equipping the youth with market-relevant technical and vocational skills. The state will need more than 500,000 skilled workers by 2022 across various industries. The project will help seize this opportunity by providing support in developing relevant and good quality TVET programs thereby improving employment prospects of nearly 65,000 youths by 2022. The funding will establish a polytechnic for women, six city livelihood centers, and seven rural livelihood centers, and upgrade 11 employment exchanges into model career Centers.
These efforts will result in improved TVET awareness among youth, modernizing training equipment, implementing a training information system, forging partnerships with private and foreign entities, and creating better access to quality market-relevant TVET and livelihood development opportunities for the youth in Himachal Pradesh. The state is endowed with rich natural resources with tourism, cottage industries and agriculture being the crucial income generators. In the past, the State Government has received funding from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the World Bank and Germany’s KFW banking group to support a number of infrastructure, agriculture and employment generation programmes. Such foreign investments have opened up new avenues of income generation in India’s non-metro centres.